Zara’s pov
We don’t fight, Noah and me.
We never have.
Today we did.
The silence stretched long enough that I felt it in my chest like a physical weight, Noah standing there with his jaw locked and his eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder, refusing to give me the one thing I was asking for.
“Say something,” I said.
“Anything. Just don’t stand there not answering me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“His name would be a good start.”
“I already told you I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t… you keep flipping between those two words like they mean the same thing, and they don’t, Noah. One of them means you’re scared. The other means you’ve decided I don’t deserve to know.” My voice had climbed without my permission, sharper than I usually let myself get with him, twenty-one years of being careful and patient cracking under the weight of one receipt on his desk.
“Which one is it?”
“Both, maybe.” He finally looked at me, and there was real fear in his face now, not the guilty flinch from a minute ago but something deeper, older.
“You think I like keeping this from you? I hate it. But you don’t understand the position I’m in.”
“Then explain it to me. That’s literally all I’m asking.”
“I can’t.”
“Try. Give me one detail. Just one, Noah, and I’ll stop pushing on the rest.”
“One detail leads to another detail, and then you’re asking follow-up questions, and I end up telling you everything, and then…” He cut himself off, jaw working like he was chewing on the rest of the sentence.
“Then what?”
“Then it’s not just my problem anymore. It’s yours too. And you already have enough problems.”
“I already have this problem, Noah. You brought it into my life the second you cashed that first payment. Withholding the details doesn’t protect me from it, it just means I’m facing it blind.”
“You keep saying that like it’s an answer.” I threw my hands up, pacing the small width of his dorm room because standing still felt impossible with this much adrenaline running through me.
“Do you have any idea what this looks like from where I’m standing? My little brother, suddenly flush with cash, paying off debts that were mine to pay, refusing to say who’s funding it, right in the middle of the most dangerous few weeks of my entire life. What am I supposed to think, Noah?” Read the latest chapters at novelping(.)com.
“You’re supposed to trust me.”
“I do trust you. I trust that you think you’re doing the right thing. I don’t trust whoever’s paying you, and I definitely don’t trust that you actually know what you’ve gotten yourself into.” I stopped pacing, facing him directly.
“You’re twenty-one. You’ve never dealt with people like this before. I have. I’ve spent six weeks inside a world you don’t understand yet, and I’m telling you, the kind of person who pays a college kid in cash and demands his silence is not someone doing you a favor.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough. I know Richard Vance had a stroke that might not have been an accident. I know someone forged a legal document to force Ethan into a rushed marriage. I know someone leaked a forty-million-dollar deal to a competitor down to the decimal point. And now I know my own brother is taking money from a man he won’t name, right in the middle of all of it.” My voice cracked on the last part, fear finally breaking through the anger.
“Connect those dots with me, Noah. Please.”
He flinched at that, actually flinched, like the words had landed somewhere he hadn’t braced for.
“It’s not like that.”
“Then tell me what it’s like.”
“I can’t, because I don’t fully know myself, okay?” His voice rose to match mine now, both of us shouting in a dorm room with paper-thin walls, and some distant part of my brain registered that the neighbors could probably hear every word, and I found I didn’t care.
“I took a job. I didn’t ask enough questions at first because the money mattered more than the questions did. By the time I realized I should be more careful, I was already in it. What was I supposed to do, just walk away and lose everything I’d already done?”
“Yes! That’s exactly what you were supposed to do!”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve never had to watch someone else carry everything while you sat there useless.” Something bitter crept into his voice now, old resentment I hadn’t realized he’d been sitting on.
“You think I don’t know what you sacrificed for me? The double shifts, the tuition, all of it? I’ve watched you give up your entire life for eight years, Zara, and I finally found a way to give something back, and you’re standing here telling me I did it wrong.”
“I never asked you to give anything back. That was never the deal.”
“There was no deal. That’s the whole point. You just did it, every single time, without ever asking me for anything, and I got so tired of being the one who couldn’t pay any of it back that when someone finally handed me a way to, I took it. I didn’t stop to interrogate it the way you’re interrogating it now, because for once in my life I could actually do something instead of just watching you exhaust yourself.”
“Noah, I never wanted you to feel like you owed me. That’s not what family is.”
“Maybe not to you. But I’ve felt it every single day since Mom and Dad died, whether you meant for me to or not.”
“I’m not telling you that you did it wrong because I don’t appreciate it. I’m telling you it’s dangerous.”
“Everything’s dangerous to you lately. You married a billionaire under a legal gun to his head, there’s a saboteur running loose in his company, and you’re lecturing me about danger?” He laughed, short and humorless.
“At least I know exactly what I signed up for.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, you don’t know anything about what you signed up for. That’s the entire problem.”
The words hung between us, heavier than either of us probably intended, and I watched something in his face shut down entirely, the openness from a minute ago sealing over into something harder, more defensive.
“I’m not going to stand here and let you talk to me like I’m a child who wandered into traffic.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’ve been doing it since Mom and Dad died. You decided I needed protecting and you never stopped, even now, even when I’m the one trying to protect you for once.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of the desk chair, movements sharp with a frustration I rarely saw in him.
“I need some air.”
“Noah, don’t walk away from this conversation.”
“I’m not walking away from you. I’m walking away from being treated like I can’t make my own decisions.”
“That’s not fair, Noah.”
“Isn’t it? You’ve been running my life since I was thirteen. Every school choice, every job, every dollar, filtered through what you thought was safest for me. I let you do it because I owed you that much. But I’m not thirteen anymore, and I’m allowed to make one decision on my own without you dismantling it in front of me.”
“This isn’t about whether you can make decisions. This is about you making a decision blind, with someone who’s clearly manipulating you, and refusing to let me help you see that.”
“I don’t need you to see it for me. I already see plenty.” He paused at the door, hand on the frame, and for a moment something in his expression softened, like he was fighting the urge to say more than he’d planned to.
“You have no idea what I’ve already given up to keep you safe through all of this. None.”
“Given up how? What does that even mean?”
“It means exactly what it sounds like.” He wouldn’t look at me now, staring at the floor instead, his hand tightening on the doorframe.
“There are things I agreed to so that certain other things wouldn’t happen to you. That’s all I can say.”
“Noah, that sounds like a threat. Are you being threatened?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I can hear it in how you’re saying all of this.” I stepped closer, panic rising fast now, the fight draining out of me and leaving only fear behind.
“Please. If someone’s threatening you, or threatening me through you, I need to know. This isn’t pride anymore, this is safety.”
“I have it handled.”
“You don’t sound like someone who has it handled. You sound like someone who’s scared and doesn’t want his sister to see it.”
“Maybe I am scared. That doesn’t mean I need you fixing it.”
“Then tell me. Please, Noah. Whatever it is, we can face it together.”
“You don’t understand what I’ve already done for you,” he said, and walked out before I could ask him exactly what that meant.